Some Companies Rethink
The Telecommuting Trend

By

Sue Shellenbarger

Updated Feb. 28, 2008 11:59 pm ET

The call came toward the end of my hour as a recent guest on a Minnesota Public Radio talk show. "Jim from Minneapolis" said he and many of his telecommuting colleagues were being called back to the office.

After years of working productively from home, Jim said he was surprised and disappointed.

Although working from home has been expanding steadily, some chinks are appearing in the trend. A few big promoters of home-based and mobile-office work arrangements, including AT&T, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and parts of the federal government, have called some home-based workers back to the office, causing some to quit. The callbacks are small and don't reflect a full retrenchment, but the factors at work -- a push to consolidate operations, and the notion that teamwork improves when people work face-to-face -- suggest other employers might follow suit as recession clouds loom.

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AT&T called an unspecified number of its 5,000 to 6,000 telecommuters back to the office late last year as part of a consolidation of operations, a spokesman says. SBC Communications, which acquired AT&T and BellSouth, among other companies, and took the AT&T name, now has a national network of offices, making telecommuting unnecessary, he says. Also, some managers wanted to bring workers together to reorganize their work and build new teams quickly.

Intel recently began requiring many telecommuters in its information-technology group to report to the office at least four days a week. Full-time home-office workers now make up 1% to 2% of Intel's 5,500 information-technology workers, down from less than 4%, a spokeswoman says; managers wanted "to keep the team spirit strong, which requires face-to-face interaction, impromptu dialogues, collaboration and mentoring," she explains.

Hewlett-Packard, the company that invented flextime, called a significant number of home-office information-technology workers back to the office in 2006, during a consolidation of its 85 data centers into six.

And the federal government, also a big promoter, posted a 7.3% drop in telecommuters from 2005 to 2006, partly because of a callback by the Interior Department. Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary for the department, cites some managers' security worries about the potential theft of laptops with sensitive data, or hackers intruding on remote users' wireless networks.

All these employers insist they still fully support telecommuting. And U.S. corporate employees working full time from home are still rising, gaining 30% since 2005 to 2.44 million in 2007, says
Ray Boggs,
a research vice president with IDC, a Framingham, Mass., market-research concern. Nortel, JetBlue and others employers are expanding work-at-home.

But if these bellwether employers can call telecommuters back to the office, any company can. Telecommuters are easy to fire or relocate. Andrea Meyers had been working successfully from home for three years when her small employer laid off all of its 30 telecommuters with no explanation. It may be easier to sever people working from home, she says, because they're "not visible." Although she understood the move, "It was a shock," says Ms. Meyers, a specialist in online learning systems.

Some tips on keeping a work-at-home gig:

Perform well. In explaining the callbacks at Hewlett-Packard, Chief Information Officer
Randy Mott
said last year that telecommuting "had gotten applied more broadly than really made sense," and would be limited to "people who are proficient and who've shown they can perform over time." Make sure measurable objectives are set for your job, then meet them.

Increase your visibility. One behavior sure to irk managers is to use work-at-home freedom to move to a location so remote, such as Hawaii, that travel costs soar. Although Intel disputes the assertion, people familiar with the callbacks there cite such abuses as a factor. Wherever you're located, find ways to remain visible.

Make an effort to collaborate.
Elliott Masie,
head of the Masie Center, a Saratoga Springs, N.Y., research organization, says many younger managers are comfortable collaborating online. But as pressures mount, older managers may revert to the notion that to build teamwork, "it's important for everybody to sit around and sing 'Kumbaya' together," he says. It may be wise to join that chorus.

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